Full configuration interaction (FCI) restricted to a pairing space yields size-extensive correlation energies but its cost scales exponentially with molecular size. Restricting the variational two-electron reduced-density-matrix (2-RDM) method to represent the same pairing space yields an accurate lower bound to the pair FCI energy at a mean-field-like computational scaling of O(r3) where r is the number of orbitals. In this paper, we show that localized molecular orbitals can be employed to generate an efficient, approximately size-extensive pair 2-RDM method. The use of localized orbitals eliminates the substantial cost of optimizing iteratively the orbitals defining the pairing space without compromising accuracy. In contrast to the localized orbitals, the use of canonical Hartree-Fock molecular orbitals is shown to be both inaccurate and non-size-extensive. The pair 2-RDM has the flexibility to describe the spectra of one-electron RDM occupation numbers from all quantum states that are invariant to time-reversal symmetry. Applications are made to hydrogen chains and their dissociation, n-acene from naphthalene through octacene, and cadmium telluride 2-, 3-, and 4-unit polymers. For the hydrogen chains, the pair 2-RDM method recovers the majority of the energy obtained from similar calculations that iteratively optimize the orbitals. The localized-orbital pair 2-RDM method with its mean-field-like computational scaling and its ability to describe multi-reference correlation has important applications to a range of strongly correlated phenomena in chemistry and physics.
Full configuration interaction (FCI) restricted to a pairing space yields size-extensive correlation energies but its cost scales exponentially with molecular size. Restricting the variational two-electron reduced-density-matrix (2-RDM) method to represent the same pairing space yields an accurate lower bound to the pair FCI energy at a mean-field-like computational scaling of O(r3) where r is the number of orbitals. In this paper, we show that localized molecular orbitals can be employed to generate an efficient, approximately size-extensive pair 2-RDM method. The use of localized orbitals eliminates the substantial cost of optimizing iteratively the orbitals defining the pairing space without compromising accuracy. In contrast to the localized orbitals, the use of canonical Hartree-Fock molecular orbitals is shown to be both inaccurate and non-size-extensive. The pair 2-RDM has the flexibility to describe the spectra of one-electron RDM occupation numbers from all quantum states that are invariant to time-reversal symmetry. Applications are made to hydrogen chains and their dissociation, n-acene from naphthalene through octacene, and cadmium telluride 2-, 3-, and 4-unit polymers. For the hydrogen chains, the pair 2-RDM method recovers the majority of the energy obtained from similar calculations that iteratively optimize the orbitals. The localized-orbital pair 2-RDM method with its mean-field-like computational scaling and its ability to describe multi-reference correlation has important applications to a range of strongly correlated phenomena in chemistry and physics.
Molecular systems in chemistry often have wave functions with substantial contributions from two-or-more electronic configurations. Because traditional complete-active-space self-consistent-field (CASSCF) methods scale exponentially with the number N of active electrons, their applicability is limited to small active spaces. In this paper we develop an active-space variational two-electron reduced-density-matrix (2-RDM) method in which the expensive diagonalization is replaced by a variational 2-RDM calculation where the 2-RDM is constrained by approximate N-representability conditions. Optimization of the constrained 2-RDM is accomplished by large-scale semidefinite programming [Mazziotti, Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 213001 (2004)]. Because the computational cost of the active-space 2-RDM method scales polynomially as r(a)(6) where r(a) is the number of active orbitals, the method can be applied to treat active spaces that are too large for conventional CASSCF. The active-space 2-RDM method performs two steps: (i) variational calculation of the 2-RDM in the active space and (ii) optimization of the active orbitals by Jacobi rotations. For large basis sets this two-step 2-RDM method is more efficient than the one-step, low-rank variational 2-RDM method [Gidofalvi and Mazziotti, J. Chem. Phys. 127, 244105 (2007)]. Applications are made to HF, H(2)O, and N(2) as well as n-acene chains for n=2-8. When n>4, the acenes cannot be treated by conventional CASSCF methods; for example, when n=8, CASSCF requires optimization over approximately 1.47x10(17) configuration state functions. The natural occupation numbers of the n-acenes show the emergence of bi- and polyradical character with increasing chain length.
The variational two-electron reduced-density-matrix (2-RDM) method allows for the computation of accurate ground-state energies and 2-RDMs of atoms and molecules without the explicit construction of an N-electron wave function. While previous work on variational 2-RDM theory has focused on calculating full configuration-interaction energies, this work presents the first application toward approximating multiconfiguration self-consistent-field (MCSCF) energies via low-rank restrictions on the 1- and 2-RDMs. The 2-RDM method with two- or three-particle N-representability conditions reduces the exponential active-space scaling of MCSCF methods to a polynomial scaling. Because the first-order algorithm [Mazziotti, Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 213001 (2004)] represents each form of the 1- and 2-RDMs by a matrix factorization, the RDMs are readily defined to have a low rank rather than a full rank by setting the matrix factors to be rectangular rather than square. Results for the potential energy surfaces of hydrogen fluoride, water, and the nitrogen molecule show that the low-rank 2-RDM method yields accurate approximations to the MCSCF energies. We also compute the energies along the symmetric stretch of a 20-atom hydrogen chain where traditional MCSCF calculations, requiring more than 17x10(9) determinants in the active space, could not be performed.
The electronic Hamiltonian contains only pairwise interactions, allowing the energy of an electronic system to be expressed in terms of the two-electron reduced-density-matrix (2-RDM) in lieu of the many-electron wavefunction. The variable space for the exact N-electron wavefunction scales exponentially with the size of the system, while the 2-RDM is polynomial in scale. By using the 2-RDM as the primary variable in electronic structure calculations, it may be possible to obtain very accurate energies at a much more favorable scaling than wavefunction methods. In this thesis, we will use two existing 2-RDM methods to treat electronic systems. First, we will apply the active-space variational 2-RDM method, which directly minimizes the energy with respect to the 2-RDM, to a cadmium telluride polymer that was recently used to greatly enhance the conductivity of CdTe quantum dots. We find that this polymer is very highly correlated despite a deceptively simple structure. We will then turn to the parametric 2-RDM method (p2-RDM), which parameterizes the 2-RDM in terms of a truncated configuration interaction ansatz, but which includes additional flexibility in order to be size-extensive. We apply p2-RDM to the study of the olympicene molecule, which features both fully aromatic and diradical isomers. The parametric 2-RDM method predicts that all isomers are stable to dissociation, in contrast to coupled cluster methods which do not predict stable diradical states. We then present analytical nuclear gradients for p2-RDM, which greatly decrease the number of calculations required to perform geometry optimizations. We apply these gradients to the study of trans-polyacetylene, for which p2-RDM, unlike many wavefunction methods, is able to predict a bond length alternation (BLA) to within experimental values. Lastly, as a single-reference method, p2-RDM may encounter numerical difficulties when the reference wavefunction is of particularly poor quality. We propose a modification to the parameterization that may render the method more generally robust.
In this thesis we develop the variational two-electron reduced-density-matrix method for extended systems. Extended systems are represented in two ways: i) lattice models describing the dominant valence electronic structure with periodic boundaries to account for their extended nature and ii) a crystalline-orbital basis built from atomic orbitals using the generalization of molecular orbital theory to polymers. The first part of this thesis (Ch. 3-4) examines the performance of the variational 2-RDM method on lattice systems with tunable electron correlation. The first of these systems is the classic Hubbard model with linear and ladder lattice topologies. Because electron correlation functions, such as charge- and spin-ordering, are linear functions of the 2-RDM, the difference in electronic structure between one- and quasi-one-dimensional systems is accurately characterized. The second model contains only two-body interactions and is unique among typical spin models in that it does not have a mean-field reference wave function. The ground state wave functions from all Hamiltonians in the model have the same 1-electron reduced density matrix; consequently, one-electron theories are largely inapplicable. The superconducting eta-pairing ground states make the model a unique tool for demonstrating the necessary N-representability in highly correlated environments. The second part of this thesis (Ch. 5-6) develops a formalism for modeling materials by solving the full Schrodinger equation. Crystalline-orbital Hartree-Fock provides a set of orbitals and integral tensors for the variational 2-RDM method. We demonstrate that time-reversal symmetry, which is implicitly included in position space electronic structure calculations, must be explicitly included as an N-representability constraint on the 2-RDM when using a momentum space basis. The necessity of these equality constraints is demonstrated by the accurate recovery of the binding energy of two polymers and the symmetry of their natural orbital occupations.
A central challenge of physics is the computation of strongly correlated quantum systems. The past ten years have witnessed the development and application of the variational calculation of the two-electron reduced density matrix (2-RDM) without the wave function. In this Letter we present an orders-of-magnitude improvement in the accuracy of 2-RDM calculations without an increase in their computational cost. The advance is based on a low-rank, dual formulation of an important constraint on the 2-RDM, the T2 condition. Calculations are presented for metallic chains and a cadmium-selenide dimer. The low-scaling T2 condition will have significant applications in atomic and molecular, condensed-matter, and nuclear physics.
The computation of strongly correlated quantum systems is challenging because of its potentially exponential scaling in the number of electron configurations. Variational calculation of the two-electron reduced density matrix (2-RDM) without the many-electron wave function exploits the pairwise nature of the electronic Coulomb interaction to compute a lower bound on the ground-state energy with polynomial computational scaling. Recently, a dual-cone formulation of the variational 2-RDM calculation was shown to generate the ground-state energy, albeit not the 2-RDM, at a substantially reduced computational cost, especially for higher N-representability conditions such as the T2 constraint. Here we generalize the dual-cone variational 2-RDM method to compute not only the ground-state energy but also the 2-RDM. The central result is that we can compute the 2-RDM from a generalization of the Hellmann-Feynman theorem. Specifically, we prove that in the Lagrangian formulation of the dual-cone optimization the 2-RDM is the Lagrange multiplier. We apply the method to computing the energies and properties of strongly correlated electrons---including atomic charges, electron densities, dipole moments, and orbital occupations---in an illustrative hydrogen chain and the nitrogen-fixation catalyst FeMoco. The dual variational computation of the 2-RDM with T2 or higher N-representability conditions provides a polynomially scaling approach to strongly correlated molecules and materials with significant applications in atomic and molecular and condensed-matter chemistry and physics.